Internet Forensics

Vision of a Community Response

Spam, viruses, spyware, and phishing are the Internet equivalent of rats in New York City. You can control them, even clear them out temporarily, but try as you might, they still keep coming back.

Scams will undoubtedly become more sophisticated in the next few years. Not only must they evolve to escape whatever countermeasures are developed to defeat them, they have to deal with an audience that is becoming ever more aware of their tricks. Techniques such as keystroke logging, proxy servers, and port redirection have already been observed in the field. Perhaps the greatest threat lies in the new forms of social engineering that scammers will use to entice their victims. The traditional approaches of fake bank sites, email attachments, and offers to transfer large amounts of money are so well known that you wonder how anyone could still fall victim. But clearly they still work well enough that new types of scam are few and far between.

This is a menace that we have to learn to live with and to manage, rather than thinking someone will come along with a technical fix that will eradicate it completely. But it is important to remember that this is a menace created by people who hope to make easy money at someone else’s expense. If the financial reward is too low, if the effort required gets too large, or if the risk of getting caught becomes too high, then they will give up and go somewhere else. Right now the balance is tipped in their favor. What we ...